Monday, January 30, 2017

Presidential stupidity and the need for patriotic immigration reform

When I moved back to New York City as an adult in the late
1990s, the job that got me here was as an inspector for the Immigration and
Naturalization Services. I worked at J.F.K. airport stamping passports and
processing immigrants, refugees, tourists, celebrities, and anyone else that
came through my line.

In some cases the job could be very humbling and inspiring. For
a short time I worked at the federal building in downtown Manhattan
interviewing refugees and asylees who were applying for green cards. I met
people who would rather be fry cooks in America than engineers in their native
country. I met a woman who had seen her family murdered, a man who did time in
jail for being gay, and young guy who faced prison time for simply protesting
for his rights.

I also saw first-hand how our system is completely broken and
is largely not at all in keeping with the traditions of what we consider our
great American heritage of immigration. Our immigration laws and policies are a
patchwork of corporate influence and ethnic lobbying. There is no comprehensive
consideration of the national interest in how immigration is handled in the
U.S. and it’s been that way for decades.

In New York City, you know something crazy is going on when
people are voluntarily going to JFK Airport
when they don’t have to. This past weekend thousands of people flocked there to
protest the detention of a handful of travelers by order of a hastily drawn up
Presidential executive order travel ban that affected a handful of
Muslim-majority countries.

Travel bans like the one issued are done at times when there
is a potential immediate terrorist threat. Others that have been cited have
been President Carter’s restriction on Iranian travel during the hostage crisis
at the time and President Obama’s temporary ban on
processing Iraqi refugees in 2011. But those were limited and in response to
events happening at the time. There aren’t corresponding crises that would
equate to the recent Trump travel ban.

President Trump’s ham-handed executive order is like
everything else he has done: a dramatic show without any planning or thought
and with no understanding of the issues. He managed to make life difficult for
those border and airport inspectors on the front lines of our national defense
and energize the opposition. He’s helped open-border advocates position their
agenda as more mainstream than it is.

Trump won the election based largely on the strength of his opposition to illegal immigration
and within the first week of his administration he’s undermined his greatest
political asset.

And the biggest tragedy is that now real patriotic
immigration reform is going to be even more difficult to achieve, because any
attempt to enact a common-sense agenda is going to be linked to Trump’s
bone-headed travel ban.

This weekend’s move also hurt the fight against Islamic
terrorism. Keep in mind that our best allies in the fight
against Muslim extremists are Muslims from those afflicted countries. Trump’s
attempt at a show-business presidency punishes some of the people who worked
alongside our military in Iraq and Afghanistan, truly deserving refugees that
risked their lives for our servicemen and women.

The decay of our immigration system began in 1965 and it’s
had more than 50 years to morph into the mess it is today. It will take years
to pass the laws needed to make sensible immigration policy stick. If Donald
Trump is serious about really making a lasting change, he would stop his
senseless showboating and start drafting legislation with Congressional
leaders. That would require time away from TV cameras and social media. That
requires real work. Start now!

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About Me

I write a column called 'Notes from a Polite New Yorker' as well as short stories and poems. My column appears monthly in Kotori Magazine and my writing has appeared in GetUnderground.com, Knot Magazine, The Black Table, Too Square, and other web sites and print publications.